I had been vaguely aware of the name Mavis Gallant as a highly regarded writer of short stories but I hadn’t read any of her work until a little over a year ago, when I found a copy of her Overhead in a Balloon and Other Stories (Faber, 1989) on a seconhand books website. A few years earlier, I had thought that her stories were something I should look out for when Sinead Gleeson quoted a comment by Gallant from the preface to her Collected Stories (1950):

Stories are not chapters of novels. They should not be read one after another, as if they were meant to follow along. Read one. Shut the book. Read something else. Come back later. Stories can wait.

She was right, of course, and it’s a good principle to keep in mind, particularly when confronted with a volume like Overhead in a Balloon and Other Stories. It’s a paperback edition that combines two earlier collections, Overhead in a Balloon (1987) and Home Truths (1985). The combined volume contains 26 stories over 500 pages.

A new selection of Gallant’s “essential” stories, with an introduction by Tessa Hadley, was published this year by Pushkin Press as The Latehomecomer. It contains sixteen stories. I compared the contents list with that of the book I have and found that the books have seven stories in common: “The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” (which, I read somewhere, is said to be Gallant’s most anthologized story), two Linnet Muir stories and a sequence of four connected stories from Overhead in a Balloon about a man’s two marriages during and after the Second World War. I then noticed that the cycle of Linnet Muir stories form the final six stories in Home Truths, and therefore also in my combined volume. So, partly for the sake of having somewhere to start, I decided that for this post I’ll concentrate on “The Ice Wagon” and the Linnet Muir stories (which include “Voices Lost in Snow”, another often-discussed piece).

“The Ice Wagon Going Down the Street” is about two Canadians in Europe. They are very dissimilar; in Canada, their paths would probably never have crossed, but in Geneva they may have been placed in the same office partly because of their shared nationality. Peter Frazier is the son of a prominent and formerly wealthy family whose background has left him with with no understanding of or preparedness for the world of work.

Peter’s father’s crowd spent, they were not afraid of their fathers, and their grandfathers were old. Peter and his sister and his cousins lived on the remains. They were left the rinds of income, of notions, and the memories of ideas rather than ideas intact … When he was small his patrimony was squandered under his nose. (p. 309)

Peter’s small inheritance gets him, his wife and two daughters to Paris where he hopes to do well financially. But he annoys a former school-friend, who hadn’t liked him anyway, at the latter’s wedding. He believes that, as a result, “a French-Canadian combine was preventing his getting a decent job” and appeals in letters to some “English”-Canadian contacts to whom the name Frazier might still mean something.

No one answered directly, but it was clear that what they settled for was exile to Geneva: a season of meditation and remorse, as he explained to Sheilah, and it was managed tactfully, through Lucille. (p. 305)

Lucille, his sister, alerts him to a position as a filing clerk, which he successfully applies for. The job was not intended as a sinecure but Peter treats it as one, imagining that the work is irrelevant and that what’s really going on is that he is undergoing some penitential test before being readmitted to the world where people like him make their fortunes as a matter of course.

The other Canadian is Agnes Brusen, Peter’s immediate superior at work, though younger than he. When she gets his name wrong he reads too much into it:

If she had called him “Ferris” and pretended not to know he was Frazier, it could only be because they had sent her here to spy on him and see if he had repented and was fit for a better place in life. (p. 312)

But there’s no reason why she should recognize the Frazier name, or know that it used to mean something in Toronto, which is far from where she was brought up. He gets her wrong too, describing her as “a Norwegian from a small town in Saskatchewan” (p. 310), and is surprised that a “Norwegian” doesn’t drink or ski, but she insists “I’m not from any other place” except Saskatchewan (p. 317).

Though Agnes doesn’t usually drink, she has too much at a party and Peter is asked to make sure she gets home safely, while his wife, Sheilah, works on a new acquaintance named Simpson who looks like he might be able to put an opportunity their way. Sheilah is extremely beautiful, a former model, originally from Liverpool, where she and her family were “rat poor” (p. 307). She and Peter had temporarily fallen into disfavour with the party’s hosts when “Sheilah had charged a skirt at a dressmaker to Madge’s account. Madge had told her she might, and then changed her mind” (pp. 317–8). So, while Peter is surely wrong to think that he is under observation or scrutiny, it seems that Sheilah is the one being tested.

Restored to the Burleighs’ guest list, Peter and Sheilah squabble a bit on the way to the party but close ranks as they approach it.

… to show Peter she treasured him and was not afraid of wasting her life or her beauty, she took his arm and they walked in the snow down a street and around a corner to the apartment house where the Burleighs lived. They were, and are, a united couple. They were afraid of the party, and each of them knew it. When they walk together, holding arms, they give each other whatever each can spare. (p. 319)

Agnes has been one of the few guests at the party to have obeyed the instruction to come in costume. When she and Peter get to her apartment, she is cold and wet from the snow. (Peter has forgotten what the hired car looks like and where he parked it and anyway Sheilah has the key.) Seeming to forget that Peter is there, Agnes goes to take a bath. When she comes out of the bathroom, wearing “a dressing gown of orphanage wool” (p. 323), she presses her face and rubs her cheek on his shoulder and Peter thinks “this is how disasters happen”.

The next week at work Agnes is feeling guilty and full of self-reproach. She says “I led you to think I might do something wrong” (p. 325). Peter interpets this as meaning she might have had sex with him.

“I might have tried something,” he said gallantly. “But that would be my fault and not yours.” (p. 325)

But he is getting her wrong again.

“It was because of you. I was afraid you might be blamed, or else you’d blame yourself.” (p. 325)

Peter seems still not to grasp what she is saying, or perhaps he’s being deliberately obtuse. She continues:

“… I’m not a suicidal person, but I could have done something after that party, just not to see any more, or think or listen or expect anything …” (p. 326)

Agnes is sickened by the behaviour of “educated people”, after her family have worked so hard to make her one of them. “You’re educated and you drink and do everything wrong and you know what you’re doing, and that makes you worse than pigs” (p.326)

Agnes considered doing away with herself so that she wouldn’t have to confront this any more, but of course she doesn’t do so. She says it’s because she’s afraid that Peter would be blamed for not preventing her suicide, or might blame himself, though we can assume that this isn’t her only reason. What she tells him doesn’t register with Peter: he seems not to hear her.

Sheilah’s efforts with Simpson have borne fruit and soon she, Peter and their daughters are off to Ceylon as “the Fraziers began the Oriental tour that should have made their fortune” (p. 327). The story opens about eight years later (nine from when they first left Canada). They have not managed to make their fortune in Ceylon or Hong Kong and are living temporarily with their two daughters in Lucille’s overcrowded apartment, where their steamer trunk blocks access to the fridge. They still have the Balenciaga dress that Sheilah had worn to the party years before, but it is too long for current fashion and the collar is stained from makeup. “The Balenciaga is their talisman, their treasure” (p. 304).

They think about the many people they’ve met, whose names represent their past. Peter thinks about Agnes Brusen but doesn’t mention her name to Sheilah.

Agnes is the only secret Peter has from his wife, the only puzzle he pieces together without her help. (p. 327)

If Agnes really is the only puzzle he pieces together without Sheilah’s help, then maybe his wife is partly responsible for Peter’s wrong answers to the other puzzles: his misreading of his circumstances, his continuing misunderstanding of what’s expected of him, his fantasy of being watched over by influential people who ensure that “Nothing can touch us” (p. 309).

The story gets its title from something Agnes had told Peter about her childhood. She was brought up in a large family, and the only way she could find to be alone was to get up very early, before everybody else. When she did so, she would watch the ice wagon going down the street. Peter understands, up to a point, but in the end Agnes’s refuge doesn’t appeal to him:

Everything works out, somehow or other. Let Agnes have the start of the day. Let Agnes think it was invented for her. Who wants to be alone in the universe? (p. 328)

But Agnes has never suggested that she thinks early morning solitude was invented for her, or that she wants to be alone in the universe; only that as a child she enjoyed temporary respite from living in a crowded home.

The narrator of a sequence of six stories, Linnet Muir had three godparents. It’s as if, in choosing a third, her partents had been making a gesture at compensating for their own deficiencies. Linnet tells the reader that her mother “had found me civil and amusing until I was ten, at which time I was said to have become pert and obstinate” (“In Youth Is Pleasure”, p. 409). Finding her daughter civil and amusing did not stop Charlotte Muir from sending the child away to boarding school from the age of four. While the Muirs were anglophone (Angus Muir had originally come from Scotland) and nominally Protestant, though not actually believers, the school they chose on the recommendation of Dr Raoul Chauchard, a particular friend of Charlotte’s, is a “Jansenist”, and of course francophone, convent (“The Doctor”, p. 488), where Linnet will claim to have actually encountered the devil.

When she’s at home during holidays, she sometimes overhears one parent asking the other how long it will be before she goes back.

That Charlotte’s perception of her daughter changed when Linnet was ten may be significant: that’s when Angus Muir died. His death was kept from Linnet, and she never reliably learned the circumstances or exact date of his death. He had a terminal illness but there’s a suggestion that he may have shot himself rather than wait for the disease to take its course.

The narrator tells us that three years after Angus’s death she was still expected to believe that he had gone to live in England and might send for her.

Head-on questions got me nowhere. I had to create a situation in which some adult (not my mother, who was far too sharp) would lose all restraint and hurl the truth at me. It was easy: I was an artist at this. (“In Youth Is Pleasure”, p. 419)

Somehow a rumour seems to have spread that Linnet too is dead. When she returns to Montreal after she turns eighteen, her former nurse, Olivia, is astonished (but apparently pleased) to find that she’s still alive; and Linnet later remarks:

I had heard people say, referring to me but not knowing who I was, “He had a daughter, but apparently she died.” (“Between Zero and One”, p. 439)

About two years before he died, Angus Muir took Linnet, then 8 years old, to visit her third godparent, Georgie. Georgie, whose given names were Edna May, was a former friend of Charlotte’s. Linnet understood that the two women had fallen out because Charlotte had reneged on a promise to name her daughter Edna May, after Georgie. Later, she recognizes that this is not entirely plausible, since Georgie is not herself known as “Edna May”.

Georgie doesn’t seem pleased to see her goddaughter. On a previous visit, Linnet left a mark on a white sofa, by kicking her feet. The spot is no longer visible “owing to new slip-covers” (“Voices Lost in Snow”, p. 480) The conversation between Angus and Georgie seems inconsequential, as far as Linnet can see. She mentions that she met Georgie only once more. That would be more than twelve years later, when Linnet was a journalist (and a married woman, Mrs Blanchard), interviewing Georgie as “president of a committee that sent bundles to prisoners-of-war” (“With a Capital T”, p. 513).

In “Voices Lost in Snow”, there seems to be some kind of negotiation going on between Angus and Georgie, as to whether he will leave Charlotte and take up with Georgie. It obviously doesn’t lead anywhere. Some years later, Angus’s friend Ward Mackey tells Linnet:

“Georgie didn’t play her cards well where he was concerned. There was a point where if she had just made one smart move she could have had him. Not for long, of course, but none of us knew that.” (“Voices Lost in Snow”, p. 482)

And would it have been worth it, after all, if he was going to be dead within two years? Linnet has some idea that it was Angus, not Georgie, who didn’t play his cards well. In her memory or imagination Angus put down a card which Georgie didn’t pick up.

It was a low card, the kind that only a born gambler would risk as part of a long-term strategy. She would never have weakened a hand that way; she was not gambling, but building … The card must have been the eight of clubs — “a female child.” (“Voices Lost in Snow”, p. 481)

That’s the end of Georgie’s and Angus’s game: Georgie is not going to take up a female child. At their later meeting, Georgie tells Linnet that she has four godchildren, all male, and that none of them will inherit anything from her, as she has nothing to leave. Was she never really Linnet’s godmother at all, or did she renounce the relationship along with her former friendship with Charlotte?

The eight-year-old Linnet isn’t fully aware of what is going on between her father and her supposed godmother, but nor is she oblivious to it. In “The Doctor”, she declares:

Unconsciously, everyone under the age of ten knows everything. Under-ten can come into a room and sense at once everything felt, kept silent, held back in the way of love, hate, and desire, though he may not have the right words for such sentiments. It is part of the clairvoyant immunity to hypocrisy we are born with and that vanishes just before puberty. (p. 493)

There’s another Linnet Muir story that I haven’t mentioned so far. It’s “Varieties of Exile”, in which the adult Linnet befriends a married man, Frank Cairns, whome she describes as “a remittance man”: someone who is being paid an adequate though certainly not extravagant income by his father to stay away from England. It was, she said, “a term of abuse all over the Commonwealth and Empire” (p. 462). She seems acutely aware that it’s a term that might have been applied to her father.

I’ll be returning to this volume, whether in this newsletter or elsewhere I don’t yet know. There are several stories I’d like to say something about, and that I’ll need to reread, or in one or two cases read, before I do so, among them the horrifying “Bonaventure” and “In the Tunnel”.